


Tick Tock

by spideywriting (catch_you_later)



Series: whumptober 2019 [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Adrenaline, Explosions, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Parent Tony Stark, Protective Tony Stark, Protectiveness, do not copy to another site, no.13, no.2, whumptober2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-08 22:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20843087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catch_you_later/pseuds/spideywriting
Summary: ...goes the clock.Or, the fic where Peter hears a bomb ticking and decides to do something about it.(Tony Stark is not amused.)





	Tick Tock

**Author's Note:**

> Un-betaed.

He very nearly doesn’t hear it.

The train clonking, the people whispering, chattering, coughing, the air conditioning humming, all of it is making enough racket to practically deafen his keyed-up senses.

He’s learnt to dial them down a little, of course, but because he’s consciously suppressing the background noise, it filters through as a great indistinct cacophony of sound. A singular sound is almost indistinguishable from the rest.

That’s why he nearly misses it.

* * *

He’s listening to AC/DC – Tony’s fault; he’d loaded his favorites into Peter’s phone, disabled it from playing any other music and told him to ‘educate himself’ – when he boards the train. _The Highway to Hell _is just ending and in the brief silence before the next song, before the train starts moving, he hears a weird noise and feels a shiver travel down his spine.

It’s an electronic beep, but it doesn’t sound like an announcement or an alarm or anything like that.

When the train starts moving, he loses the sound under everything else and dismisses it as a mistake.

Then the train stops again, and the noise is _still there_.

Peter takes one of his earpieces off and listens curiously.

Coughing.

Rustling.

_Beeping_.

He takes the other earpiece off as well.

It wasn’t just a one-off like he’d previously thought. It’s _continuous_. Like someone forgot to switch off their alarm. Maybe someone tried to sleep on the way to work or school and overslept their alarm? In that case they probably wanted to be woken up before they missed any more stops.

Peter shivers again and starts shuffling towards the beeps.

It’s quite difficult to move in a full morning train while concentrating on a single sound, but Peter manages to track it down all the way to the second train car. He glances inquisitively around him, trying to spot the sleeper, but weirdly enough, no one seems to be sleeping. Several suit-clad people are tapping their phones and shoes on the aisle, a couple of teenagers are scattered here and there and a few senior citizens are huddled up on the seats.

But no one is outright sleeping.

And yet the beeping comes from here.

His spidey-sense blares to life in full-throttle, flooding his veins with adrenaline.

His whole focus zeroes in on the beeps, locating them to the best of his ability.

It didn’t occur to him earlier, but it seems as if no one else hears the beeping so it must be very quiet, meant to be concealed, so he probably won’t be able to see the thing causing it. Instead, he closes his eyes. The noise is more loud to him now, almost breaking his concentration, but he can tell it’s coming from further ahead. He moves fluidly in the mass of people between him and the beeping, his senses preventing him from crashing onto anyone.

The beeps stutter and hitch up a notch.

Peter feels a bucketful of icy dread and numbing panic pouring into his circulatory system as he finally connects the dots between the beeping and his spidey-sense reacting. Quickly, he glances around him, searching for a solution and by some crazy stroke of luck, the train seems to be arriving at another stop, breaks screeching in deceleration.

As soon as the train stops, he pulls up his hood, grabs the bomb (a _bomb_!) and shoots out of the doors, ignoring the undignified “heys!” and the angry “NO” that follow his frantic dash.

_There are too many people here._

_Nowhere safe to go._

The man whose bomb-slash-briefcase he stole exits the train too and starts running towards him.

He panics, his wild gaze sweeping the station for a safe place for the bomb to detonate.

_There isn’t one._

The ticking hitches up again.

_He doesn’t know how much time he has._

The thought jolts him from his panic and he starts running towards the escalators and stairs leading outside. He’s got to get the bomb out of this closed space at the very least. As he arrives to the escalators and stairs, he jumps up on the metal slope between the handrails of the escalator and the stairs and _sprints_. He hears rough cursing echoing from the platform as the man tries and fails to follow him.

Peter allows a small smirk quirk his lips.

As soon as he’s clear of the stairwell, he floors it for the front doors. At this point some of the morning commuters have heard him clanging his way up and have turned to face the stairwell entrance in curiosity. He sees curious or miffed glances and _phones_ pointed at him so he pushes the hood deeper over his face, ducks his head and tries to move so fast that they can’t get a proper picture.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

He grazes a few people as he breezes past, shouting a short “sorry!” as he goes, and soon enough people start to make way for him, if only to spare themselves the unintended but very likely shoving that would’ve taken place.

Peter bursts through the front door and immediately flips to the roof of the building across the street. He figures that up is probably a safer direction than down and starts swinging himself higher and higher, climbing up the tallest buildings he can find. At the same time his panicky gaze flits wildly around, trying to find a space big enough and unoccupied enough for the bomb to explode even moderately safely.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

There’s not really many options here. Either he throws the case up to the sky as far as he can throw it and it explodes there, possibly endangering the people on the upper levels of the buildings around the explosion site or…

Or there’s a cemetery just a couple streets away where there should be statistically the least amount of (_live_) people around at this time.

Right now everything depends on whether he can make it that far before the bomb explodes.

The beeping hasn’t sped up in a while, weirdly enough, so Peter risks opening the case and checking how much time he has.

As soon as he clicks the case open, he can hear the ticking suddenly picking up speed exponentially—

—and he sees a red 8:43 flash into a terrifying 1:00 and counting down.

His breathing stops dead in his chest.

_Beepbeepbeep_.

_Thudthudthud_, his heart is a thunderous roar in his ears, speeding up in time with the ominous beeping.

0:59

0:58

It’s 0:57, when Peter is able to shake himself from his horrified stupor. He glances frantically, desperately around, trying to come up with a plan, _any_ plan to salvage his mistake.

He considers the distance between him and the cemetery.

_Won’t make it._

Then he rapidly calculates if the his body spin speed would create enough centripetal and centrifugal force for the bomb to fly far enough to detonate safely and whether he should throw it directly upwards here or move closer to the cemetery and throw it over it, the thoughts and numbers flashing through his mind lightning-quick.

The calculation would probably been a even quicker if he had Karen to help him, and he briefly regrets not having enough time to dig his mask out of his backpack, not being able to know the right answer with certainty, but he manages to conclude that staying here and angling the throw up and towards the cemetery should be the safest choice. He is currently higher than most of the rooftops around him, and the houses were shortening towards the cemetery so there should be enough airspace for a safe detonation, especially if he also angled it as upwards as he could.

As a precaution, Peter covers the inside and the outside of the briefcase entirely in webs to smother the inevitable blast. He approximates the time the bomb will be airborne before it reaches the apex of the throw and sets up a time when to let go. Then he attaches a string of webbing to the case and begins to spin around quickly to gather as much momentum as he can.

He spins, faster and faster and faster andfasterandfasterfaster_fasterfasterfaster_, counting the beeps until it’s _time_.

All the air in his terror-constricted lungs whooshes out in a desperate cry as he uses every last bit of his strength to fling the bomb as far as he can.

The briefcase hurtles across the air, the string of web flapping behind it and _damn_, he didn’t count that into his calculations, but it seems to travel pretty far despite that…

…until a couple of meters before Peter’s calculated apex point and it _still hasn’t exploded_ and it starts falling and there are _people_ down there and Peter _panics_.

In a streak of mad brilliance he angles a web-shooter (he’s never been as grateful for getting into the habit of always keeping them with him after the airport fight as he has been today) towards the bomb and sets it manually into web grenade mode. He fires multiple web grenades after the bomb-briefcase and watches with bated breath as each of them give the bomb a little upward boost upon impact, delaying the fall.

And just as the last web grenade nudges it upwards again, it explodes.

The sky is splattered with a bright flash cushioned in grey smoke. There’s an ear-splitting _boom_ followed by a small shockwave that shatters the nearest window glasses and rattles others further away.

And Peter, too intent on making sure the bomb explodes safely, has been staring right at it. Without a mask to cover his oversensitive eyes and ears.

As the bomb explodes, Peter feels like his head simultaneously bursts into an epicenter of pure _pain_. Disorientated from the stabbing agony in his eyes and the horrible roar in his ears, the shockwave manages to disrupt his usually good balance, throwing him on his back and almost sending him careening off the roof entirely.

There’s a horrible swooping feeling in his stomach as he tumbles down too fast, limbs flailing, but not catching on anything.

_Nononononono_.

In the last second just as he’s sliding over the edge, he twists around and slams his hand down onto the rooftiles, sticking into place. His whole body is shaking from _toomuchtoomuchtoomuchpainpainpainPAIN_, but he manages to drag himself back to a safer, flatter part of the roof. For a moment he just lies there, trembling and panting and whimpering in pain, until the pain rises to a higher level and drags him down with it.

* * *

_“Kid? Kid!”_

_“Kid, wake up!”_

“Peter!”

He slams into reality with force, lurching up and gasping and feeling very dizzy. There’s a blur of red and gold right next to him, which seems to be holding him up and talking to him.

“…huh, buddy? Did you have to go and try if you could send me to an early grave? Did you?”

Belatedly, he recognizes the red-and-gold thing as the Iron Man suit.

“Mr. St’rk?” his voice breaks a little as his throat feels like it's full of tiny needles.

Mr. Stark's voice softens perceptibly.

"Hey, kid. You okay?"

It takes him a while to process the question, but eventually he croaks out a "'M fine."

Judging from the skepticism on Mr. Stark's face, he doesn't seem to believe it, and to be honest, Peter isn't quite sure _he_ believes it either.

"Well, my head hurts, and — and I’m a bit sore?” he answers sheepishly.

“A _bit_ sore? Have you looked at yourself? Did you even think about what you were doing? Why didn’t you put the suit on? And while I’m at it, why, _why_ didn’t you call me about a goddamn IED?”

An IED.

An Improvised Explosive Devise.

_The bomb_.

Suddenly Peter is all struggling limbs and poorly contained alarm.

“The—the bomb! What happened? Was anybody hurt?! Is—”

“Hey, hey, easy kid, easy,” Mr. Stark puts a restraining hand on his chest, “I’ll tell you in a minute if you would just _calm down_.”

Peter slumps back down again.

“Everything’s fine. Nobody died and only a few people had some minor injuries from the glass shards. _You_, on the other hand, were suffering from severe sensory overload, your ears are _bleeding_, there are multiple contusions on your back, and it appears you’re also _a bit sore_.”

“Oh,” Peter says faintly.

“Yes, _oh_.”

A moment of silence as they both gather themselves.

“I didn’t have time,” he confesses quietly.

“Hm?”

“I didn’t have time to call you or put on the suit, the bomb was already ticking when I found it and I had to get it away from people and then I was running and then I made mistake and the final countdown started too early and—,” he rambles, the words catching on each other, running together until he’s having trouble getting the word tangle out of his mouth.

“It’s okay, buddy, take a deep breath,” Mr. Stark says, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

Peter nods and concentrates on breathing in deeply and leaning back against the comforting solidness of the Iron Man armor. As he breaths, he can feel the dizziness that had emerged to the forefront of his mind slowly retreating back again. It wasn’t gone, but it was more manageable.

As soon as Mr. Stark determined him calm enough, he continued, “So, start over from the beginning.”

And Peter did. He told him about the weird noise in the train, his senses tingling, finding the suitcase, running, opening the case (at this point Mr. Stark takes a deep breath before asking him to continue), devising a plan, executing said plan, executing the hastily thought emergency plan after that, almost being blown off the roof and getting to safety.

As he explains, Peter is getting more and more aware of his surroundings, finally sitting up properly. They’re still on the same rooftop, and while there’s a sickening smell of burnt sugar and smoke tainting the air, there doesn’t seem to be any larger-scaled destruction.

_Huh_. _It worked_.

The sudden rush of relief at the realization is so great that Peter sways back to Mr. Stark’s shoulder from the strength of it.

“Peter! What’s wrong?!” Mr. Stark exclaims, startled by his faint.

“_No one was hurt_,” Peter exhales, his eyes dampening with yet-to-be-spilled tears, his body going lax as the adrenaline wears off.

Mr. Stark is silent for a while, only moving his hands to hold Peter more securely against him.

“…Yeah, kiddo. No one was hurt. You did good.”

There’s something quiet but glowing in Mr. Stark’s words that settles warmly into Peter’s chest.

If he didn’t know better, he might call it _pride_.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the second installation of my whumptober2019 collection. I hope you liked it! If you did, please drop me a kudo and/or a comment, I would really appreciate it. <3  
You can also come and chat with me about Spidey-related things on tumblr (https://spideywriting.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
